Jaqueline Fraser at Priska C. Juschka Fine Art

Priska C. Juschka Fine Art is pleased to announce Jacqueline Fraser’s first New York show since her 2001 exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. This new installation, titled A clearer portrait of the Lost Boys [[in eleven parts deftly and eleven details of straining]], expands on and clarifies the themes in that earlier show without diluting any of their power to shock.

Fraser says the key word to this show is "gorgeous," an ongoing interest of hers. In the last year she has been in the Venice Biennale; the Yokohama Triennial and the New Museum, New York.

Look closely, for example, at the sheets of fabric pinned to the wall like specimens. The beauty of these refined prints and shimmering moirées comes across as a mean joke in a flawed world, a world of refugees, of children orphaned by civil wars or environmental disasters. In the face of it all, how has anyone managed to sustain such a stubborn belief in elegance?

Thankfully, Fraser has. Each of her works is a gift of splendor to prejudice’s victims and perpetrators (the division between them forever blurred) across the globe. Steel wires, alive with the spirit of Calder and Cocteau, sketch these boys in profile, boys who have lost their way, lost their hope or even lost their lives. Meanwhile, a sparkling rescue squad of women, one for each boy, marches across the opposite wall like a parade of milkmaids.

Fraser’s text tells the tale in an oblique Victorian poetry. Behind the formal voice of these circumlocutions, though, a sense of outrage simmers, ready to boil over.

It’s fury without a target. Or rather, with millions of targets. Over the years Fraser has carefully pruned her work of any cultural specificity, at times using multiple languages, other times appending lists of country names to suggest multiple points of entry. Surprisingly, the effect has been not globalization but individuation. In their inscrutability, these works do not convey a universal suffering so much as they do one woman’s ongoing struggle to reconcile it with all the lavish beauty in the world.

-- Craig Garrett